Yeah, but I think more will come in time. However, at a personal level, do we need all the studies, or do we act on what we observe and experience? If everyone who smokes is getting sick with cancer, do we need a study to tell us not to smoke?
Yes, we definitely do.
Not everyone who smokes gets sick with cancer. Everyone has a story about a friend's grandpa who drank whiskey and smoked every day and lived to 95... you need studies with large data samples to actually determine what is accurate, what is anecdotal, and the differences between causation and correlation... especially when you have a very profitable industry willing to throw a lot of money to confuse the issue.
Do certain cigarettes' have different affects on different genetics, is it worse for people who have asthma from air pollution from nearby factories? I personally think studies are essential - you can only observe a really small sample of people in your own life.
I think banning things can totally work, but it has to make sense, it has to have wide support and it has to be enforced appropriately. Australia has dramatically changed drinking and driving culture in two decades - that's incredible... but it took a massive investment in Police and Booze buses and a huge public education process - and road fatalities have dropped significantly. Not to zero obviously, and cars are safer than they were, but it's an incredible achievement.
I do agree that banning social media won't work by itself, it has to be combined with a huge educational process to teach people how to use it appropriately to protect themselves and others.
In my experience, people who don't think they should pay taxes don't really understand how society actually works.
I think that if you only do what there are studies supporting (if it was possible), you would end up a pretty big mess.
But, they are also close to your own life - similar conditions. When 9 smokers die of lung cancer and 1 lives, do you tell your child to smoke, because they might be the one that survives?
Have you ever considered whether it was worth all the cost and energy? What other problems could have been tackled with the same money? Perhaps it might have had a better impact spent in another place.
I'm not super sure what you're saying here... but I think it's important that studies are peer-reviewed and replicable, and that other researchers challenge them with their own studies. There's ways to catalog it all so that it all contributes to ever-expanding human knowledge.
No, I absolutely wouldn't... but I also don't think many things in life are this clear cut or neat. I think it took much longer and a lot more data to determine the negative effects of second-hand smoke for example, because that wasn't as obvious.
Life is messy, there are millions of variables all the time, so I think the more information and the more research the better.
Absolutely! Everyone is going to have opinions on the efficacy and priority of an exercise like this... but this is where collecting as much data and research can help us determine if it was successful, if it was cost-effective and compare it to other exercises. Once you've got the data and information, only then can we really discuss if the effort was worth the reduction in road fatalities and injuries.